Tangential to fantasy of manners

[calimac]

sartorias wrote in her latest post:

I’ve had this argument with pomo friends who are repelled at the very idea of FOM, maintaining that literature ought to be focusing on the sufferings of the working class. About economic survival. There is certainly a place for such writing, but I don't believe literature always must wave the bloody shirt.

Interesting that you should say this, because it's something I was just thinking about anyway.
B. has been hankering to read some Robert Nathan, inspired by Darrell Schweitzer's article on Portrait of Jennie in a recent NYRSF. For more Nathan, I fetched from the library a copy of The Barly Fields, a 1938 omnibus of five 1926-31 Nathan novels. A lot of water had passed under the literary bridge in the few years since those books were new, so Nathan prefixes a short "Note to the Younger Generation" as his apologia for writing the small-scale playful ironic fantasies which had become, it seems, out of date. Nathan says he likes the social realist muscular fiction which had become de rigeur in the 30s, but fiction of the heart, what he's trying to write, is just as legitimate. (And of course he was about to write Portrait of Jennie, so he wasn't about to change.)

At the end, Nathan signs the note and dates it "New York, December 1937." Now that's interesting, because in that very same month, a professor in England sat down and wrote the opening words of a novel that would be denounced more than any other as irrelevant, escapist, unmeaningful and inappropriate to modern life.

In fact, you could make a case that The Lord of the Rings is actually a pioneering social realist fantasy novel. Not in class relations in the strict sense, though one of the leading 1930s politically-aware poets, W.H. Auden, became one of Tolkien's leading literary defenders. But if you see the humanoid species of Middle-earth as analogous to classes, Tolkien is clearly showing how the last shall be first, which is a message a social realist could endorse, even if it's not of social realist origin.

But mostly I'm thinking of how the real subjects of the book are power, war, and death. In its attention to those, and its treatment of them, no Hemingway or Steinbeck could ask for more.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I earmarked that article for reading when I get time (hah! hah!) but I don't think I've read any Robert Nathan. Sounds interesting.

As for Tolkien I think one can make a case that LOTR can be said to fit several categories. Some books are so big they cover enormous amounts of territory. Fantasy of social change? Yes. War novel? Yes. Catholic novel? Yes. Secular adventure story? Yes.

One minor thing, and only offered because I know you are meticulous about details, and not as a neener: don't forget that de rigueur does have two u's.

Nathan

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

One nice thing about Nathan's works is that they're short. I read Portrait of Jennie in a single work day. I read more than half the book at lunch then finished it up at dinner and a little afterwards. And no, I didn't take a long lunch that day!

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

I'm waiting for my copy of Portrait of Jennie to arrive in the mail. We need to touch base once I read it. And yes, that NYRSF article got me wondering about this book I'd never heard of.